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Thanks to cloud storage, a lot less paper is used these days and a lot more trees spared. But companies today are contending with the massive growth of data — much of it is unstructured data — and increasingly longer data retention requirements. The issues that remain top-of-mind for them are server space and cloud storage costs.
One solution is to use storage tiers. This helps ensure that important data that needs to be readily available is and data that needs to be retained but not necessarily accessed frequently is moved to a cheaper form of storage. That’s the premise behind tiered storage and caching.
For both, data is assigned a tier number — usually between 0 and 3. The lowest tier represents data with little tolerance for downtime or latency and requires more expensive storage medium. This kind of data often includes scale-up transactional databases for analytics, financials and healthcare.
The highest tier number is typically reserved for archival data. It has to be stored long-term to meet compliance, historical analysis or other business needs. However, it isn’t accessed often so it doesn’t need to occupy high-priced storage space.
With tiered storage, data is moved to a different storage medium when access patterns change. The location is selected to balance availability, performance and the cost of the storage media.
Caching temporarily places a copy of the data on a high-performance medium to improve performance. But the cached data also resides on a lower storage tier. The host software or storage controller places a copy of the data in the SSD cache between the application and back-end storage. The original data remains in its initial location.
Neither concept is new, but both can be labor-intensive. That’s why many storage and software vendors now automate the process in the products. However, few have figured out how to incorporate low-cost object storage into the data tiering mix.
That brings us to cloud-based archival and Veeam and US Signal.
If you’ve been using Veeam® Backup & Replication™ 9.5 Update 4, part of Veeam Availability Suite™, you already know that it delivers availability for all your virtual, physical and cloud-based workloads. It enables fast, flexible and reliable backup, recovery and replication of all your applications and data from a single management console.
With its Cloud Tier feature, older backup files can be offloaded to more affordable object storage provided by S3-compatible service providers. That includes US Signal. All it takes is adding US Signal’s Cloud Archive for Veeam.
Per policies configured within Veeam, backup files are archived to US Signal Object Storage (known as the capacity tier in Veeam) as they age out of the operational restore window. The oldest backup files can also be sent to object storage if your storage performance tier runs out of disk space. In simple terms: you get unlimited capacity for long-term data retention at the lower cost of object storage.
Without getting too detailed, here’s a brief overview of how US Signal’s Cloud Archive for Veeam works.
Data is stripped out of Veeam backup files and offloaded as blocks of data to US Signal Object Storage. This leaves a dehydrated Veeam backup file on the local extents with just the meta data remaining in place. The meta data is saved in object storage as well. If the local dehydrated file is lost or corrupted or the entire source site lost, data can still be retrieved because the meta data is stored in the cloud.
This is all done using a policy set against the Scale-out Backup Repository (SOBR). It dictates the operational restore window with local storage used as the primary landing zone for backup data. It’s processed as a tiering job at predetermined intervals. The result is a space-saving, smaller footprint on the local storage without hindering recovery operations.
Backups offloaded to object storage remain transparently accessible to all Veeam functionality. They can be restored to production directly from US Signal Object Storage without prior staging. You can still perform instant virtual machine recoveries, computer and disk-level restores and file-level and item-level restores.
Low-cost object storage isn’t the only thing you can get from the collaboration between Veeam and US Signal. Cloud Archive for Veeam is just one of the three services available in US Signal’s Cloud Availability for Veeam. It also includes Cloud Backup for Veeam and Cloud Replication for Veeam. Combine all three services for a complete data protection strategy in a single pane of glass. Or choose the specific service that best meets your needs.
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